Hey all, I've been having lots of fun doing some converting of various formats, like ripping wave/cue sheets, then converting with foobar to other lossy formats, but the one thing that still puzzles me to no end, is the transcoding from flac to a lossy format! It was always my understanding, that the fewer steps in a conversion equates into better quality, so wouldn't the extra step of transcoding from flac, be that added step thats not there from the wave file?

Also, can you please explain to me, in plain English please , what is actually stripped from a wave file during its conversion to flac.

The reason I am asking all this, is because I already have all my CD's ripped to flac, and rather not do it all over again with secure mode in EAC to rip to wave/CUE Sheets! Hey thanks everyone for helping me out!

Nothing is stripped from the WAV file when it is compressed to FLAC - when uncompressed you will get byte for byte compatibility with the original WAV file, i.e. you lose none of the data contained in the WAV file. Also, FLAC is taggable so you can add useful information into the container's metadata.

...well none of the PCM data anyway, or does flac now preserve RIFF chunks?

And speaking of, yes, wave files can contain tags.

@CheechOZ, EAC doesn't create RIFF chunks; so for your purposes this is not an issue.

Only lossy conversions can degrade soundquality. Lossless conversion is.... well, lossless.

As for why FLAC instead of WAV:
- uses up less space
- metadata

Well you can compare FLAC to Zip archives.

Both offer reduced size after compression.
Both offer the original data after decompression.
Both can contain tags or comments identifying the contents of it.
Nothing of significant importance is striped.

Ok then! Looks like it's flac instead of ripping everything to CUE Sheets! Thanks for the help everyone, and any addition info on this will always be appreciated!

You can embed a cue sheet within a flac (IIRC) for added fun